


The Reincarnation Game

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: Original Work
Genre: Afterlife, Death, Gen, Reincarnation, Terrible lives, implied Seaworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9794324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: This is the story of the lives that were not blessed by karma. Each one wants a second go round, to get it right, because everyone deserves a second chance. But what if your second chance goes badly every time? How often do you have to fail before Death steps in to lend a hand?





	

Death watched the little toad pad out of the shadows. It looked confused, unsure of its way, and its steps meandered left and right, but Death did not attempt to guide him. One way or another, the toad would reach them, so they waited for him patiently.

When the toad’s eyes met Death’s, Death asked silently for his life. And the toad relinquished it just as silently: he’d been a good toad at the start, but had contracted a horrible disease at a young age, which impeded his ability to hop, and his life had ended early and in agony, with one of his legs ripped clean off and his innards spilling out onto the rocky ground. Death nodded sympathetically in response to this sad, painful existence. “You have options, now. Choose carefully. You may go to the afterlife, where you will exist in peaceful consciousness, always as a toad. You may haunt the ponds where you once lived, and tread the ghostly footsteps of your life. Or you may go into oblivion, and never exist again, except for in memory.”

“… Are those all of my options?”

Death wished that they were capable of lies. “No. You may also live again in a different form, and have another life on Earth, with no memory of your previous one.”

“I choose that.”

Death fought the bitterness in their voice as they said, “As you wish. Live again, then.”

Death floated in an endless sea, and waited for their next arrival. The waters were clear, but they extended infinitely into a formless and featureless blue. It would take some time for her to find Death in all of this space. Death was content to wait; they swam in a circle languidly and enjoyed the disturbances of the water.

The orca swam to them with purpose, cutting the depths with a strong streamlined body. Death watched the oil-slick sheen of her blubber glint as she moved, saw one droopy white eye-patch catch theirs: a sea of pain, just in there. Death’s request bubbled through the water, a telepathic shockwave, _give me your life, please._

A life no one deserved. Born in captivity to a mother who would only swim two lengths of the pool with her, before being cruelly ripped away in a swarm of nets and hands and vans. And after that, the training: denied food unless she performed her tricks just so, scratched and bruised by her fellow inmates, left in a dark cell for the night... And after _that,_ her breakdown, and first kill, the horrifying and gratifying feeling of her prey squirming against her might – useless in the water, wielding none of the power land gave him – the dark quench of his blood on her tongue.

And after that, nothing but darkness, immobility, a life sentence of solitude for her crime, until it ended with her quiet diseased death. Death looked disgustedly at their anthropomorphic form, their pale skeletal hand. How the orca must _hate_ them, appearing in the guise of her tormentors. With a silent ocean-wide vibration, Death changed form, and glistening marine eyes stared at each other. _You have options,_ Death said, in the voice of the killer whale, _you may live on in heaven, you may haunt the park which caused you so much pain, or you may fall asleep, enter a final but welcoming darkness, never to wake…_ The growing horror in the eyes of the orca forced Death to finish the offer. _Or you may try again at life._

 _I’ll try again! I’ll do better!_ Then, as if this were some determining factor in her fate, the tortured beast cried out, _I promise I will do better._

Only when she was sent into the next world, did Death respond, humanoid and skeletal once more: _no, you won’t._

It was a great many years later that an old man hobbled to Death once more. He still had blood down the front of his shirt, from where he had coughed it up in his last hours. Death was not skeletal today, or underwater, or in a nameless hallway. Death sat on a park bench, and waited patiently for the man to reach them. His eyes lit up with an old, forgotten delight. Death was a beautiful androgynous creature, capable of awakening any rusted and unused libido with just a stare. “Well,” said the man, “I sure am glad to see you here, uhm… ma’am, sir.”

Death’s eye moved downwards, and they felt something tangible pluck at their heart. “You’ve lost your leg again.”

The man glanced at it, as though he’d forgotten the prosthetic was there. “Oh yeah. That was back in ‘Nam. Long time ago, now…” He furrowed his brow. “Hey. What did you mean _‘again’?_ ”

“Doesn’t matter. Your life, please.”

The man stretched his arms out wide. “Well, this is the first time someone’s actually asked for the damned thing. You want the long story or the short?”

“As short as you can make it,” said Death, “Without leaving out the important parts.”

The man nodded. “Well, I guess the first thing was ‘Nam. Shook me up proper, that did. Couldn’t walk in a neat straight line for months, had sleepless nights for months longer, and my leg _never_ came back, of course. And _then_ there was the whole civil rights deal, which I had no part of personally, though it would have been nice to have them, and that turned my whole pasty neighbourhood against me. Survived a lynching by the skin of my teeth, thanks to Valerie. We never had much, but we had each other…” The man smiled, “Until she died of course, at which point I had no-one, and drink became my new partner.”

“You are taking longer than usual.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. Please continue.”

“Right. After that, my kid decided he was too good for a washed up drunk like me, so he headed up North, into the bright lights of NYC. Met a boy there. Got nothing but a postcard a year from him, until one day…” The man did not smile at this point again, “Well, the way I heard it, the Virus is no kind way to go. I just wished I could have been with him in his final days. Made things right. Anyhow.” He reached out his arms towards the beautiful figure. “What comes next?”

Death said simply, “Death.”

The man, whose eyes held more than one lifetime’s worth of pain, said “Now, don’t be coy here. There’s more, I know it.”

“There is an afterlife. You may go there.” They did not bother with pointing out the other options. No one wanted to be a ghost for eternity, and no one wanted to sleep for eternity. But still the man narrowed his eyes at them, and Death’s heart sank: it was the same game every time.

“What else?”

Bound to the truth, Death said it as quickly as they could: “Reincarnation.” There was that terrible, hopeful awed silence, and they could hardly bear it. “You can see Valerie again. You can see your son again if you go to the afterlife.” _Just don’t choose life again._

The park was unusually quiet and empty, and finally the old man seemed to twig something. “Why don’t you want me to have another chance? Don’t I deserve one?”

Death laughed hollowly. “If you knew.”

“Try me.” There always was something different about humans, something more stubborn and greedy, which meant they would be denied nothing. Death pressed their cold fingers to the man’s forehead, and let him see.

Thousands of lives poured through the flesh, wringing themselves into knots, twisting with the memories of pain. The man cried out, and tears gushed out of his eyes involuntarily, huge and pitying. “I have given you many chances,” Death answered his silent plea. “And none of them have worked.” The man could only gasp and cry, so Death continued quietly, with the deeper truth: “I cannot bear to see you fail again. Please rest now. Life isn’t for everyone… There is more…”

A steeliness had entered the man’s expression. “No. There _isn’t_ more. And if I can have another go at life, I deserve a good one.”

“It is not your fate to lead a good life,” Death sighed. The old man clanked his prosthetic leg insolently against the ground.

“Well, maybe not if the odds are so stacked against me! I mean, what chance do I _got,_ a Negro living his twenties through the ‘60s in Texas? What kinda head-start is that?” He straightened his back, and the sun caught the behind of his head, darkening his face but fuzzing his outline to a white glow – “I just need somethin’ a little more my speed.”

It took Death a moment to understand the human’s meaning, and when they did, there was nothing they could do. “Live again,” they whispered, and watched the soul lift up and dissolve into the aether, ready to return to life on Earth.

A mere few weeks later, Death said to the blade of grass: “Give me your life.”

 _It was nice,_ said the grass. _I grew up from the warm earth, and I felt the dew drip off my head. I looked up and I saw the sky. It was beautiful: by day I counted the clouds, by night the stars. I died quickly, twisted in two in the fingers of a child._

“And what do you want to do now?” asked Death, their palm a cradle for the barely formed, half-lived and beautiful life. The wind rustled the living earth around them, and swept the blade of grass into the air for a second.

 _I want you to take me to the sky,_ was all it said.


End file.
